[OFBiz] Dev - Jira and Community Involvement [was: Jira 174]

[David E. Jones]

This brings up a good issue... prioritizing efforts in OFBiz.

Pretty much everyone involved in OFBiz does things on their own time  
and decides what they want to work on, or does things on an employer's  
or client's time, and prioritizes the needs and requests of those "what  
pay for da time."

I certainly try to handle incoming requests and issues, but at times it  
is simply more than I as an individual can handle. I really appreciate  
the help of Jacopo, and sometimes various others on these things, but  
more is needed...

With a tool like Jira we really can have more community involvement,  
and it would help a lot! There are dozens of outstanding issues in  
Jira, and various other bugs, issues, priorities, etc that are not in  
Jira. For things that aren't in Jira, we should push submissions there  
more, and I plan to start entering the things that I would like to work  
on there, things like:

- move to CSS-based layout, especially in ecommerce (partially done,  
but quite a bit left to do)
- clean up CSS layout and other CSS issues in the manager applications,  
especially the order manager right now
- entity extension/override mechanism in Entity Engine entity  
definition files (can help with customization and more isolated  
components)
- conversion of JPublish and JSP/Region pages to use the Screen Widget
- a simple but full back to front set of example artifacts in the  
example component, plus narrative about what everything means and what  
the development process for creating those artifacts might look like
- address the issue where an un-closed (committed or rolled back)  
transaction makes threads bad, and never recovers; need some recovery  
mechanism so that one bad bit of code among the hundreds of events and  
scripts and such won't bring down an entire server
- fix bugs and other issues that come up (these constantly do, right  
now around 5-10 per week typically)

Some of these are necessary to get resolved ASAP, and some are  
necessary or at least HIGHLY desirable to get done before the next  
binary release.

=========== THE KEY:

To help with my decisions on priorities for these and other things, I  
would REALLY appreciate community feedback. This helps the project  
serve the needs of those who are using it better, and it allows me to  
step out of the position of being that bad guy that tells people who  
have invested effort into something: sorry, I won't review it and put  
it in because in my opinion it is a lower priority than other  
outstanding issues.

How to help?

1. vote for tasks/issues in Jira that you think are important!
2. review submissions and improvements in Jira and comment on them
3. if you have a pet-peeve or other issue, submit it as a Jira issue  
with good detail, and then vote for it

This will help those that do the final review and commit to feel more  
comfortable that there are no major issues with the changes and  
additions, and if there are issues to get them resolved before the  
final review and commit effort begins.

If you have an issue that you think is important and no one is looking  
at it, don't ask me or the other commiters to take care of it, send a  
message to the users or dev mailing list and ask people to review it  
and vote for it.

There have been various discussions about this over time, and I think  
the project is to the point where not doing things this way is  
preventing growth and progress...

I'm very interested in hearing feedback on this, and even MORE  
interested in seeing feedback and voting going on in Jira.

Thanks to everyone for all of your help, including you Adrian. I know  
you have put a lot of effort into this contribution to the project, and  
I wish I had more time to work on such things and facilitate those  
improvements in the project.

-David

P.S. Once again through pure narcissism I like this post and think it  
is important for everyone working with OFBiz to read, so I have edited  
it and added it to my blog at:

https://www.undersunconsulting.com/ofbizdoc/control/MainBlog? 
contentContentId=BLOGROOTJONES&currentMenuItemName=BLOGROOTJONES


On Apr 14, 2005, at 1:28 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:

> Could we start getting some of the patches committed? They're starting  
> to get old enough to cause conflicts with the current SVN.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> Dev at lists.ofbiz.org
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
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